For Cuban exiles, the Versailles cafe is a parallel world. If there had been no revolution, no Fidel Castro, they would have been sipping coffee and reading the daily papers in a place just like this in Havana.
But 45 years on, they are still in Little Havana, Miami, in exile limbo.
PHOTO: EPA
The waiters in starched white shirts and forest-green waistcoats make the Versailles look as the Cuban capital once did; so do the tiled floors and coffee counter where Cuban-Americans come to gossip.
The menu and the ambience are essentially unchanged in decades, but the politics of Little Havana are changing in small ways that could have a big effect on this year's presidential election.
The change is clear to anyone who looks out of the Versailles window and across the road,where the John Kerry presidential campaign has set up an office, plastered with Democratic paraphernalia.
As electoral effrontery, this is on a par with Republicans opening up in Harlem. In Florida, the Cuban vote is the rock on which President Bush's 2000 electoral victory was built. Coraled and coddled by Jeb, his Spanish-speaking brother and state governor, 82 percent of Florida's 450,000 Cuban-Americans voted Republican.
That near-monopoly is now showing signs of crumbling. Younger Cubans and more recent immigrants are turning away from the politics of the post-revolutionary exiles, los historicos.
One of the younger men drinking coffee, Ignacio Luzarraga, is a perfect example. He is 26 years old, a second generation Cuban-American, who will not follow family tradition at the polling booth on Nov. 2. He will be voting Democrat, for Senator Kerry.
"The younger generation of Cuban-Americans will not follow suit just for the sake of following suit," he said.
To talk to older Cuban-Americans about politics is to take a detour down four bitter decades of US-Cuban relations, in which the Republicans established themselves in Little Havana as the party of anti-communism, the embargo, and, in exile eyes, of revenge.
Luzarraga's concerns are like those of most other young Americans. He worries about Iraq, and believes George Bush "has not been honest as he should have been" about the reasons for going to war and its consequences for US troops and for the Iraqi people.
Tessie Arau is another Cuban Republican who won't vote for George Bush. She runs a company organizing flights to Cuba for Cuban-Americans to see relatives.
In May, the Bush administration ordered those trips to be cut to one every three years per person. The decision delighted hard-line historicos, who no longer have close ties to the island. For many newer arrivals, the measure was a disaster.
"It's inhumane. There was a gentleman who killed himself because he knew he couldn't see his autistic son for three years," Arau said. "I don't see how that brings democracy."
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